Ear Job (3): Tinnitus

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[This is the next installment in what appears to be a series of ongoing posts about my experiences with ears, hearing aids, and hearing in general. If you missed the earlier bits, feel free to backtrack to Part 2 (on hearing aids); there’s a link there to the first part.]

While preparing to write this post, I went back and read the previous two on the same topic. Lo and behold, I couldn’t help noticing what was, for me, a classic evasion. To wit:

If you were to write a shorthand transcript of my hearing-aid experiences based on nothing but those two posts — and you knew nothing about shorthand, but maybe just enough about HTML and such to be clever, if not outright dangerous — it might read something like this:

stuff leading up to first hearing aid
FIRST HEARING AID
mumblemumblemumblemumble
FIRST WHIZ-BANG HEARING AID
etc.

I’ve gotta clear up that mumblemumble stuff, if I’m to be honest here (with you and with myself).

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Aging Gracefully, and Otherwise

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The Methuselah Tree, White Mountains CA: oldest known living tree (4800+ years old)At least in the drafts I’ve done so far, the work-in-progress, Grail, uses a rotating point of view from mostly elderly characters. Because I’m not elderly yet myself (though I will be if I don’t work on it faster!), and knock on wood still fairly healthy, it’s tricky to tell the stories from inside the heads of people whose experiences I can’t yet report first-hand.

Not that I’m looking forward to any of these psychological and physical experiences, but I’m forced to wonder: What does it feel like to have a stroke or heart attack, to start losing one’s memory, or to fall, be unable to get up, and have no little LifeCall pendant to summon aid? How does it feel to long for the company of not just one or two, but a lot of people who’ve passed on before you? How easy or difficult is it to shed preconceived notions you’ve clung to for sixty or seventy years — do you even know you still cling to them?

(The hardest characters to write are the ones you’ve never experienced from the inside. Which is why most writers start out with protagonists of the same sex and cultural background as the authors’ own, of no greater age. Disaffected adolescents, anybody?)

In the course of looking around for information — anecdotal as well as scientific and medical — about the experience of growing old, I came across an article on Slate from this past May, headlined Forever Young; the subtitle spells it out for us: Books and Web sites about how to avoid getting old, or at least looking old. The author, Emily Yoffe, describes a “two-prong strategy for trying to stop time. The first is to find the right combination of food, exercise, supplements, and medical interventions to extend your life into triple digits.”

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The Internet and Dogs

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I was working on the weekly whisky river-driven rumination — which I’ll deliver a little later — when I came across something I just can’t keep to myself. Actually three somethings. And *WARNING*WARNING*: these are spit-take funny.

Most recently, and the item which led me to the other two, we have this: an Open Letter to President-Elect Obama, re: Goldendoodles. Excerpt:

I’m sure the first coupling of a Golden Retriever with a poodle was an accident, and likely the fault of the dogs themselves. Then, some idiot without a social conscience sold them by saying that the dog is similar to a Golden Retriever, only smarter.
…
A smarter Golden Retriever? This just means that you have a dog that is obsessive-compulsive about retrieving to the point where nothing else exists. Nothing. They don’t want affection, they want to chase a ball. Toby plays fetch while he’s eating — he has his own personal game of jacks where he drops his ball, grabs a mouthful of food, drops the food on the floor, and eats however many kibbles he can before the ball stops bouncing (For science, I once threw a ball while he was taking a dump… if you do acquire a Doodle I strongly advise against this).

A comment on that post led me to 2007’s I Has a Sweet Potato. This is simply an account of the author’s adventure at home while “Best Beloved,” the author’s S.O., is elsewhere. It is presented “in conversation form.” Excerpt:

Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren’t starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.

[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.] [From the kitchen, there comes a noise like someone is eating a baseball bat.]

Finally, reaching way back to 1999, there is the classic Dogs in Elk. This has been reproduced at various locations around the Web, but according to the author, originally appeared on Salon. (She also affirms that yes, it is true.) However, I read it here. It’s a transcript of a forum conversation; the subject is how to handle odd dog problems. Excerpt:

Anne V – 01:01 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – Okay – I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

AmyC – 01:02 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – Um, can you give us a few more specifics here?

Anne V – 01:12 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – They’re inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring. I have company arriving in three hours, and my current plan is to 1. put up a tent over said carcass and 2. hang thousands of fly strips inside it. This has been going on since about 6:40 this morning.

Have fun, but remember: swallow beverages first. No liability here.

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Bart Seinstein

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Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…

A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that I’ve seldom seen an entire episode of The Simpsons.

(Once they learn my last name, even people who don’t know me take it on faith that I must be a fan. When I was living in Virginia, pre-The Missus, I had a Saturday-night ritual which in part involved placing a pizza order at the Domino’s in the center of town, and then driving in to pick it up a few minutes later. The first time the kid who took phone orders asked my name, he busted out laughing. “Bart,” he said without explanation, “is that you?” I probably went to that Domino’s at least fifty times thereafter and every time — whether taking my order or when I arrived to pick it up — he greeted me with a hearty “Bart!” When I moved away, I should have stopped by Domino’s one last time to give him a token of some kind — a used copy of Crossed Wires, at least, the pages marked here and there with greasy thumbprints and a bookmark of crust or pepperoni. But, duh, I didn’t.)

Anyway, although I haven’t seen the show that much, I have picked up plenty of the in-jokes and recurring elements which have made their way into the general culture, elements like the very last view of the family, sitting on the couch at the end of the opening credits, in an apparently infinite number of variations of the same pose(s). I’ve seen plenty of Simpsons quotes used in email and forum sigs. I know that the exclamation “D’oh!” doesn’t translate to Duh, as one might expect, but more like something on the order of Oh, CRAP.

(Naturally, I’m expecting to be descended upon by show geeks to point out the nuances — why Homer doesn’t, for instance, simply say Oh, CRAP because in Season 2, Episode 11, he was etc. etc. etc.; and/or why, for another instance, D’oh! doesn’t mean Oh, CRAP! exactly, as I certainly could have figured out on my own if I’d just done some simple research, even Wiki-freaking-pedia got that much right, dude!)

Anyway, again, at least I knew enough about the show to be surprised that no one else, using one of the online time-sink toys at hetemeel.com, had apparently thought of this:

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Dad (and Others), Somewhere and Sometime

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Dad, WW2, somewhere in France #1

(1) Me — during work hours. Just came up for a breath of air.
Dad, WW2, somewhere in France #2

(2) It’s me again. Actually working! See, I told you so!
Dad, WW2, somewhere in France #3

(3) Here I am still working. I don’t know how I can work so hard!!

The above photos (taken somewhere in France, sometime in 1944), their captions penned in ink on the back, the handwriting in which the captions appear, and the voice in which I can hear the captions spoken — all are exquisitely familiar and completely alien to me. And I bet they are to some of you, too, even if the faces, places, and years are different.

Thanks, Dad.

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Paying Attention to History

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If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

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Rome, and the Day It Wasn’t Built In

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My head keeps saying This isn’t a political blog… this isn’t a political blog…

My heart, though, can’t deny the huge chunk of me myself which is political…

Short version: I have voted in ten Presidential elections. That’s 36 years. For nine of those elections, I have watched the returns on TV and read about them the next day and thought to myself, alternatively:

  • Oh no. The evil bastard won…!
    OR
  • Well, maybe he’s not perfect — but at least the evil bastard didn’t win…!

We were at a “watch party” last night. When the clock rolled over at 11:00 — when the West Coast polls closed — and the networks started making their calls, I completely lost it: sobbing, laughing, fighting the sobs and giving into the laughter. (The Missus finally suggested that I go into the bathroom and splash some cold water on my face. It helped.) But the tremors continued, off and on, until I fell asleep at around 1:30am. (They resumed this morning, every time the reality struck me anew.)

[getting a grip on self]

I just want to share a little bit of classical history with you right now. It goes back to at least the third century BC, in the ancient city of Rome.

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From Keith Knight’s Mouth to God’s Ear, Please

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Cartoonist Keith Knight is a regular contributor to my favorite monthly magazine, The Funny Times. To break the routine from his main comic strip, called The K Chronicles, he occasionally does a strip called “Life’s Little Victories.” He builds these strips from ideas submitted by readers — little one- or two-panel ideas describing the little things that make life worth living.

From the weekly Funny Times “Take a Break” cartoon email newsletter, here’s a recent and highly relevant collection of such victories (numbers 265 through 270), applicable across the political spectrum:

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What’s in a Song: Blue Moon

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[This is the first in a series of every-now-and-then posts about popular songs with long lives.]

Some great songs go through subtle changes over time: the original lyrics are updated to correspond to more modern diction and taste; rhymes get improved or dropped altogether; refrains are added and subtracted; and of course new arrangements can, with the slightest addition of an instrumental passage, change our very understanding of what a song means.

“Blue Moon” didn’t begin as a classic — not in the form it eventually acquired. While the music remained unchanged, its lyrics didn’t simply evolve: they mutated almost overnight, going through three versions before finally settling down into their fourth and (more or less) final variation.

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